@ Ars Electronica: The Big Picture

As our world becomes increasingly complex and inter-connected, we need a new lens to help us make sense of it all.

Science helps us model and understand complexity; design helps us interface with and manage it. Combined, science and design constitute a singularly powerful lens to navigate the future.

Data visualization applies this lens to the growing volume of data in the world. Through this craft, we are starting to gain a new "Big Picture" perspective on the patterns, flows, and forces that underpin modern life, prompting new ideas, insights, and emotions.

Visualizing the Big Picture is a collection of contemporary works produced by designers and scientists that reveal this new perspective.

Encompassing more than 350 thousand websites from 196 countries and from all domain zones, the map presents the links between websites. Each website is represented by a circle on the map, and the larger the amount of traffic of the website, the bigger the circle. Users' switching between websites forms connections, and stronger connections position the websites closer to each other.

Mapping Wikipedia visualizes all the geo-located wikipedia articles for a number of languages. The mapping highlights geo-linguistic contours and uneven geographies: regions that are densely populated with contested edits, and virtual deserts with sparse article coverage. The work offers an intriguing mirror of cultural and sociological difference, and a vast aggregate of shared human effort.

Everyone Ever in the World is a visual representation of people who have lived versus who have been killed in wars, massacres and genocide during the recorded history of humankind. The visualization uses existing paper area and paper loss (die cut circle) to represent the concepts of life and death respectively. The total number of people to have lived was estimated through exponential regression calculations based on historical census data and known biological birth rates. This results in approximately 77.6 billion human beings to have ever lived during the recorded history of humankind and is represented in the poster.

Never Forever Never For Now is a quantitative visualization of the transient nature of empire. The visualization graphs all known empires, colonies and territorial occupations from 2334 BCE to the present day. Each empire occupies a slice of the pie graph with a known start (+) and end (×) date. Each slice is assigned a transparency value of 10% allowing for concurrent empires to be visualized – the more empires that occupy the same period of time in history, the whiter the graph. As history progresses, the competition for wealth, resources and the relentless drive toward conquest and occupation is clearly seen in the graph.

If the Internet is a global phenomenon, it is because there are fiber-optic cables underneath the ocean. Light goes in on one shore and comes out the other, making these tubes the fundamental conduit of information throughout the global village. To make the light travel enormous distances, thousands of volts of electricity are sent through the cable’s copper sleeve to power repeaters, each the size and roughly the shape of a 600-pound bluefin tuna. Once a cable reaches a coast, it enters a building known as a 'landing station' that receives and transmits the flashes of light sent across the water. The fiber-optic lines then connect to key hubs, known as 'Internet exchange points,' which, for the most part, follow geography and population.

Space has always been an important field in visualization. View of the Sky #2 is a star map that allows the user to choose between real and apparent positions of the stars, and thus reveals actual 3D shapes of constellations.

What if you could take a picture looking at the same direction from 20,000 locations spaced evenly throughout a city? And what if you assembled those photos into a map of the city? With some code and some knowledge of how Google's Streetview backend works, you can. The project 18,154 Consistent and Regular Views of NYC does just that: the built and natural fauna of the city, and its high level structure emerge.

Maps offer distorted projections of the real world, and these deformations get stored mentally to the point that they can become collective representations of the geography of the real world. Metrography attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Underground. With this project it is possible to observe the deformation of geography based on time.

Sea Transportation Network is a series of visualizations of sea transportation paths that were traced based on the real GPS coordinates of vessels during 2010. Ships visible in the video are simulated agents following the paths. A number of patterns emerge from this chaotic network of connections: from hubs like the Suez or Panama, through the transportation belt between Europe and Asia, to how spread the routes in the Pacific Ocean are. And despite invisible geographical information, viewers can still recognize shapes of the continents like Africa.

Communication is an integral part of daily life in cities, and today we are able to replay all the data related to communication networks. In a given day, Swisscom subscribers in Geneva generate approximately 15 million connections from 2 million phone calls. This information called 'digital traces' offers new insights about cities, which are of great interest both from a economic and political perspective.

urbmet.org is a web-map that illustrates data on material and energy use in cities. The goal is to provide an intuitive way of understanding this complex system using an interactive interface. 42 cities have been analyzed and their material and energy intensities have been estimated.

This visualization presents a map of the known universe. All the astronomical objects have been projected onto a plane, and a logarithmic scale has been used to show both nearby objects, like our own solar system, as well as objects that are lightyears away, like quasars and galaxies.

Worldshapin helps to study the interdependence of health, living standards, carbon footprint of a country, workplace equality, and education across countries in the last three decades. Worldshapin is a tool to visualize the interplay between sustainability and human development. It forms a unique picture of the world through shapes that are easy to understand as well as interesting and unique to look at.

This visualization shows money movements around the world due to remittances (money sent by migrants to their home country). In contrast to all direct efforts made by governments in trying to alleviate poverty, the remittances are particular initiatives which all together have in some cases a notable influence in a country's GDP (gross domestic product) and are therefore contributing to economic growth and poverty alleviation. Looking at wealth inequality in the world, migration and remittances can be seen as a spontaneous process of trying to get more balance in the global wealth.

Migration is one of the major problems in global world. Every year millions of people change their locations. Peoplemovin is an interactive graph that highlights migration patterns in the world as of year 2010 in one single view through the use of a slopechart.

Scientists today suggest that we have entered a new geological epoch dominated by humanity - the Anthropocene. This film is a 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history from the start of the Industrial Revolution. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.

The map visualizes the global digital divide. It displays more than 80,000 populated places in blue and about 350,000 locations of IP addresses in red. White dots indicate places where many people live and many IP addresses are available. The IP address locations are taken from the GeoLiteCity database by MaxMind and the database of populated places is taken from geonames.org.

Sense of Patterns is a series of printed data visualizations aiming to depict the behaviors of masses in different public spaces. It is based on data related to Vienna and its suburbs, displaying taxi trips during the July 25, 2011.

The map provides an estimate of building energy consumption ('delivered' energy as opposed to 'primary' energy) throughout New York City. The estimate is specific to the weather of New York, the particular function of the building and the built-up area of the building. The page describes how energy usage was estimated.

This network map represents the influencers in the world over time. It uses Wikipedia to extract the data of those people with known influences, arranges them and clusters other personalities who are similarly related thinkers/authors. There are highlighted communities in different colors which reveal sub-networks within the total structure.